To the novice, gardening can be a mysterious art, full of rules on when to plant, how to prune and what to grow. It’s only with years of experience that you get to know which things are important and which ‘rules’ can be safely broken. Until then, books are a good guideline and The Apprehensive Gardener aims to be that “crook to lean upon”.
It’s the result of 20 years of information gathering by Griselda Kerr who, failing to find a general gardening guidebook when she was rejuvenating her Derbyshire garden, started collecting advice.
Ignoring design and planting schemes, The Apprehensive Gardener is about how to care for the plants you already have, what to do if they’re ailing and how to get the best out of them.
It’s designed to be used either as a reference book – each plant mentioned appears in a comprehensive index that allows you to track its care through the year – or as a monthly guide with a list of things that should be done that month.
Kerr, who trained in horticulture and garden design, is quick to point out that these are guidelines only: “nobody without an army of gardeners could do everything in this book.” It’s a comfort to this gardener who usually knows the theory but misses the deadlines.
The book is necessarily general in its approach without individual care plans for different cultivars or a monthly entry for every plant. Anything else would have been unmanageable.
Instead, if more detailed instruction is needed, in pruning, for example, Kerr suggests other books or nurseries to consult and there is a recommended reading list at the back.
If you’ve gardened long enough, much of the information was familiar but gardening is one of those things where there’s always something new to discover. I had heard of the ‘Chelsea Chop’ where plants are cut down by a third to delay flowering but not the ‘Chelsea Heave’, which is lifting a plant’s crown to crack the roots. The subsequent need to re-establish itself again delays flowering. Both methods are so named because they should be carried out around the time of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in mid-May.
Some of the advice may become redundant with time: there are moves to ban glyphosate, which is suggested as a way of tackling bindweed.
With a list of common names and their Latin counterparts and a comprehensive glossary of gardening terms, The Apprehensive Gardener does much to demystify gardening.
I really liked this book and will be using it as a monthly reminder of all those things I ought to think about doing – without any promises of actually completing the ‘to do’ list.
•The Apprehensive Gardener by Griselda Kerr is published by Pimpernel Press, priced at £16.99. I was given a copy in return for an unbiased review.
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